18 March 2015

A practical,
actually-existing alternative to the bourgeois State – The Commune – arose in
Paris, France, in the beginning of 1871.

It was more than the right of
recall, and it was more than the whole people collectively in power and in
perpetual democratic session. It was also the reappearance of The Armed People
in a new kind of societal framework.

So-called Primitive Communism
is an Armed People. Primitive Communism has been destroyed, and continues to be
destroyed, by the simultaneous rise of property relations and fall of the
women. But here, in the Paris Commune, was an Armed People in advanced
productive circumstances. The Paris Commune prefigured the end of the bourgeois
State’s monopoly of violence, and the consequent eventual fall of the bourgeois
State in the world as a whole.

The security forces (army and
police) existing in France prior to the Paris Commune had been paid by the
bourgeois State to guarantee its survival. They were tasked with suppressing
the working class, whenever they found suppression to be necessary, by any
means of suppression they thought necessary, and they were therefore constantly
prepared for bloodshed and slaughter. These forces were disbanded by the
Commune and were not replaced until the Commune fell.

With hardly any exceptions,
all “separations of powers” were abolished in the Paris Commune, leaving one
main and constant power: The Armed People.

A century later in Chile, in
the time of the Popular Unity government that fell on 11 September 1973,
instead of an Armed People, a virtue was made of disarmament, and a “Peaceful
Path” was worshipped as the new political Golden Calf.

In the document linked below,
Volodia Teitelboim gives a brief description, from the point of view of one of
those who was involved in the Chilean Popular Unity government, of its
disastrous end. The fascists used the national army to overthrow the national
government on behalf of the bourgeoisie. It was a shocking reminder of the real
purpose and nature of the “special bodies of armed men” that are part of The
State. They are intended to preserve the allegiance of the State to the bourgeoisie.

Teitelboim calls for “A
Reappraisal of the Issue of the Army,” meaning a return to the view of the
Paris Commune, which is mentioned in the first line of Teitelboim’s document.
This document is sufficient as the basis for a very good and necessary
discussion in South Africa at this time.

Like the Chilean Popular
Unity government, ours in South Africa today is a multiclass government
underpinned by a class alliance for common goals. It is a unity-in-action,
otherwise called a Popular Front.

Why has the South African NDR
survived for nearly 21 years, while the Chilean Popular Unity fell after 1,000
days?

The answer could be that we
are not pacifists, as so many of the Chilean Popular Unity politicians were.

Or, the answer could be that
our crisis has just not arrived yet.

Or, that we have passed at
least one crisis, which may not yet be the last. That was in mid-2008, and it
was resolved by the recall of President Mbeki and the resignation of various
ministers including Terror Lekota and Mluleki George, Minister and Deputy
Minister of Defence, respectively.

Also attached is Dimitrov’s
famous intervention at the 7th Congress of the Communist
International (Comintern), in 1934, which readopted popular front tactics -
tactics that proved successful in mobilising the anti-fascist alliance that was
by 1945 victorious in battle.

Picture:
There are very few images of freedom fighters in formation, in action, or ready
for action, to be found on the Internet, whether of MK or of any other
liberation army, but there are many photographs of freedom fighters in
captivity, or dead.

Full justice has not yet been
done. Alive or dead, the revolutionaries are still rebels and outcasts in the
minds of the “respectable” bourgeoisie. For our part, we are still singing the
Internationale, composed in Paris in the days of the Commune by the communard Eugène Pottier.

The picture is of a statue of
the freedom fighter Dedan Kimathi, under the blue sky of Kenya.